Tests Ease Life for College-Bound Students : Education: High school youths save time and tuition costs by passing Advanced Placement exams. Some now get extra recognition they didn’t get before.

Camarillo High School senior Jullia Rosdahl spent hours studying for Advanced Placement exams last school year.

Like most students who take the rigorous tests, Jullia’s goal was to pass with a score of 3 or higher, earn college credit and, as a result, save on tuition.

But her main reason for taking AP exams in three subjects in May, Jullia said, was to see if she had what it took to pass them.

“I wanted to challenge myself,” the 17-year-old said. “I wanted to see if I could do it.”

Jullia and 14 other Camarillo High School students did so well on AP exams that they were honored in a program started this year by the New York-based College Board, which administers the exams.

Jullia and eight other Camarillo High students passed three AP exams, earning scores of 3 or better on a scale of 1 to 5 and winning AP Scholar status. Five other Camarillo students--four of whom have since graduated--passed four exams to earn AP Scholar With Honor status.

And one student, graduate Stephen Chen, took 10 AP tests and passed them all, winning an AP Scholar With Distinction Award. Chen is now at the University of Michigan in a six-year medical school program, where he will graduate with undergraduate and medical degrees.

Passing the tests can ease financial burdens because students are awarded credit for college courses in AP subjects, officials and parents at many schools said.

“We’ve had students go into college as sophomores because of the AP exams,” said Susana Arce, assistant principal at Nordhoff High in Ojai. Arce’s daughter, Ynez, is one of three Nordhoff students who received the AP Scholar honor this year.

The AP Scholar awards program “was started because the College Board thought kids get a lot of recognition for sports, but they don’t get a lot of academic recognition,” said Diane Bailey, associate director of the AP program for the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N. J., which oversees the tests for the College Board.

“They were taking so many of these exams and no one seemed to care,” Bailey said.

Of 359,000 students who took AP exams this year, about 38,500 received AP Scholar certificates, Bailey said. California students received 7,462 awards, more than any other state.

Students at many Ventura County schools other than Camarillo High have received AP awards, principals and counselors said. Sixteen students at Buena High in Ventura were honored, while Oak Park High in Agoura had eight, and Oxnard High and Nordhoff High each had three.

Officials at several other high schools said they also had students who won the awards--including seniors who have since graduated--but they had not tallied the numbers.

For students at Camarillo High and other schools, success on the test is usually the result of hours of preparation under the tutelage of dedicated teachers. Most of the teachers volunteer their time for after-school or weekend tutoring sessions.

Camarillo teachers can receive pay for up to 10 hours of additional AP tutoring a year from a fund for the school’s program for gifted and talented students, said Fran Berman, an AP English teacher who coordinates the program. However, most Camarillo High teachers say they spend far more than 10 extra hours working with students.

With AP tests coming up in the spring, students at many Ventura County high schools are in the throes of test preparation time.

“Some schools do almost nothing to prepare the kids--they don’t even mention it,” Camarillo High chemistry teacher Nathan Rundlett said. “Other schools make a big production out of it.”

At Camarillo High, teachers use various methods to help students prepare for the test. Some offer extensive extra sessions, while others say their normal curriculum is demanding enough to prepare students for the tests.

“I wasn’t stressed out at all,” said senior Bodie Minster, 17, who passed four AP tests last year. In one course, “we took the AP before the final--and the final was tougher,” he said.

Rundlett said that beginning this month, he will start gearing up with after-school and weekend study sessions to help students prepare for the tests.

“Kids need a second time around with a great many of these complicated ideas,” Rundlett said.

History teacher Jim Graves said that in the months before the exam, he holds study sessions during lunch, before and after school, and on Saturdays.

“I think they learn a lot of history in the process, even if they don’t pass,” Graves said. “It’s hell on wheels.”

Calculus teacher Andrea Colbaugh, however, said that although she meets with students for after-school review as the test date approaches, “we don’t do a Jaime Escalante kind of program.”

Escalante, formerly a calculus teacher at Garfield High in East Los Angeles, gained fame for his intensive AP tutoring sessions, which were later depicted in the movie “Stand and Deliver.”

Berman said her year-round English curriculum generally prepares students for the test. But in February, Berman begins holding four-hour Saturday seminars--buffet lunch included--for more intensive preparation. Students take three-hour practice exams a week before the actual test.

However, Camarillo High’s AP teachers stressed that their classes are not aimed at just preparing students for the test.

“We’re trying to prepare students for college in general,” Colbaugh said.

Stephen DeBaun of Camarillo High School passed three AP tests as a junior last year and plans to take several more in his senior year. “The reason I took the tests was not so much to get them out of the way,” said Stephen, 17. “It was so that I don’t have to sit through another year reviewing the same information (in my) freshman year in college.”

The more exams students pass, the more they can save in tuition at colleges that accept the courses for credit, students and parents said.

But by test day, teachers said, when all the academic coaching is done, success comes down to the student.

Explaining how the students do it, Berman laughed, saying: “They don’t sleep for a year.”